The Crocodile

1. What I wanted was to lift my body in unnatural postures High above the earth, to dance, To live beyond ideas. Imagine feeling assured you were beautiful. Girls wanted to run their fingers on my skin, also guys; I bit off their hands. If called to, I could wait beneath the water a long time. I could let a bird pick leeches from my tongue. So in the moment of youth when other people embrace passion I fell back on discipline. My throat Was capable of many different sounds but the pleasure Was in keeping silent, letting parts of me be seen. Sometimes a plover mistook me for a log But that’s not deception; I really look like a log. I survived the great extinctions, I pretended to be myself. To let you know me, I need only move my eyes. 2. Like me, you had a father and a mother, You grew up in a particular place, a particular time. Your skin displays the scars of that place. You’ve decapitated chickens, eviscerated live fish. You carry yourself with what, to other people, seems aplomb, But the impulse driving such behaviors, Necessary in themselves, has infiltrated daily life. In arguments You’ll drag another person under water till he drowns. Though I grew very large, though I developed great capacity of mind, I was afraid of my mother. Afraid not just of scrutiny But of being the object of someone’s pride. What was I protecting? She was willful, yes, But tiny, generous to a fault. In Egypt, the family crocodiles were adorned With bracelets, earrings of molten gold. Then mummified, laid out in the tombs. The word itself is from the Greek:Krokodeilus, pebble worm. 3. What manner of thing is your crocodile? * It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it has breadth; it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourishes it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. * What color is it of? * Of its own color, too. * ’Tis a strange serpent. * ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet. (“Antony and Cleopatra,” II,7) 4. When I was a child, I was given a stuffed crocodile. Don’t think this strange; most humans have dolls resembling themselves. My sister had one, too. Tiny marbles filled the sockets of its eyes. The skin was stitched together up the belly, where it’s soft, And though it was only a foot, perhaps ten inches long, The jaws were clamped together with a tack. Presumably this kept the little row of teeth from hurting you, But the tack protruded from the bottom of its chin, Sharper than any tooth. I remember rubbing over it, back and forth. When my mother died, I was right beside her. She’d been unconscious for a day. My sister and my father were there, too. I leaned down close to her left ear, I whispered, Thank you for everything you did for me, Thank you especially for what you did for our girls. Then, immediately, the color left her face, She was no longer in her body, And she sank beneath the lagoon. 5. Picture, by way of analogy, a mountain range. Some interruption of traffic, perhaps a flood, has blocked the roads, But communication between the villages is maintained over steep footpaths, The kind used ordinarily by hunters, originally by their prey. Some people speak more openly by inefficient means. And the steeper the path, the more Arduous the climb, The more likely we are to believe. Someday I won’t be hungry. I’ll watch an egret stepping through the reeds. The miser imagines there’s a certain sum to fill his heart, But for sorrow there’s no remedy. It requires what it cannot hope. We’ve known each other, earth, a long time. When the light rests low on the Nile, the Ganges, the Everglades— I could be anywhere— Day is discontinued, motionless. A voice is what you have.